With my car in the shop, I spent most of the last week commuting from my apartment near the Capitol to the Statesman’s South Shore HQ on Capital Metro and found that some improvements — dedicated lanes and newer buses — were outweighed by reductions in service that made using mass transit often inconvenient. The Statesman’s loyal readers had their thoughts about my review.
A couple of readers suggested other transportation stories deserved the attention:
To which, I say, we do lots of stories about road projects being late and over budget, investigate TxDOT contractors and write about automobile fatalities when they occur. But in a car-centric city like Austin, giving up the car for the bus is something that generates discussion.
Many of my complaints centered around the loss of frequency on the old 1L/1M/101 (South Congress/Guadalupe/North Lamar) route corridor and CapMetro’s buggy app, both of which generated discussion on Twitter, Facebook and the blog’s comments.
First to the question of frequency, which I tweeted about probably to the point of annoying everyone who followed me.
Former Austinite and fellow reporter Terri Langford loved the CapMetro service when she lived here:
There were other complaints about CapMetro’s service levels, wait times and schedule unpredictability, including this one from my Statesman colleague:
Even CapMetro’s old, more frequent service was insufficient for some, and for shorter distances, biking was the preferable alternative:
And then there’s the app.
I thought it was clunky and bug-ridden, but its next arrival feature has a lot of fans. When I tweeted out I was going to be commuting on the bus, a CapMetro employee sent me a Twitter DM to suggest downloading the Transit app, separate from CapMetro’s. I was a fool and did not listen, thinking that Google Maps and CapMetro would be enough.
Fellow reporter Eva Ruth Moravec DM’d to say: “Sure! I really do love the app. The next departure works very well for me. Take it to grad school and back and to the capitol (hubs’ office) often.”
And she loves the more social aspects of using CapMetro: “Also love most bus riders. We have solved crossword puzzles together. Told jokes. Always nice to have a conversation with someone whose path you otherwise might not cross. And great to see people helping handicapped riders.”
Other fans of the app responded to my posting on the ATX Urbanist Facebook group:
Wrote Tedd Holladay: “The app is good, and much improved from its launch. And I’m sorry but Next Departure is objectively amazing. It didn’t really work when it launched but they squashed most of the bugs and it almost always works great in my experience.”
Others found the app, especially its cumbersome “ticket activation” function, frustrating.
“The app, especially the ticket part, could use some work. Although it has gotten better in the last few months, just starting from a low point,” wrote Brennan Griffin.
